I played the first two Mass Effect games with the player character, Commander Shepard, as a man, and I’m playing Mass Effect 3 as a woman. I identify much more with FemShep - mostly because, while the actor voicing the male version is quite good, Jennifer Hale just blows him out of the water.
Well yes but that’s not the sole reason.
I don’t know whether this is a particularly important distinction, but I note that a number of the female characters named in this thread (e.g. Hermione Granger and Willow Rosenberg) are not the protagonists of their stories. They are *important *characters, but not the main character.
I could easily believe that the problem is not so much that men have a hard time identifying with female protagonists in general as that men have a hard time identifying with the type of female protagonists that commonly show up in Hollywood movies. Heck, I’m a woman and there are plenty of movies where the female lead is a character with whom I not only do not identify, but who doesn’t even remind me of any women I know.
I considered that, but if anything it should be easier to identify with the protagonist than with other characters, so being able to identify with secondary characters should, if anything, be an even stronger argument.
Another example I just remembered: My mom was an elementary school teacher, and always tried to keep her classroom well-stocked with books her students would read. The most popular books she had, among both genders, were the Addy books from the American Girl series, specifically because her students were able to identify with her.
And here we have what Streep was talking about. Movies are full of women doing things only a woman would do, and they’re women that most men don’t identify with. All the action heroines, prepubescent girls, and other nonsexual roles cited here are not challenging in that aspect.
This is an important reason why teen slasher movies attract adolescent boys, why the last one standing is usually a girl, and why that girl never has sex.
Well, of course men don’t identify with women while they’re doing things only women do. And I imagine that women don’t identify with men while they’re doing things only men do, either. The point is that the existence of those scenes don’t stop the audience from identifying with the protagonist at other times. Which, really, is almost all the time, for most characters.
I am not convinced this is the case. Since there is by definition less about a secondary character’s thoughts/feelings/behavior in the story than there is about the main character’s, a female secondary character might come across as more gender-neutral than if the same character were written as the lead. For instance, in the Harry Potter series we learn a bit about Hermione’s love life, but since the story is from Harry’s perspective there aren’t any passages where Hermione is thinking about guys she likes. There are passages about Harry and his feelings towards Cho and later Ginny. I’m sure not *all *male readers would have been put off a Hermione Granger series by reading equivalent passages about a teen girl’s budding interest in boys, but I think it’s plausible that some would have been.
But it may very well be that the Doper men who’ve named Hermione and Willow as characters they identified with would feel just the same if these were the lead characters in their respective stories. The issue may actually be that there just aren’t many movies or TV shows with smart, geeky girls as the main characters. (There’s more variety when it comes to books.) So if that’s the type of female character one most easily identifies with, they’re mostly going to be found in supporting roles rather than as the protagonists.
Interesting thread.
I wonder if that was In The Company of Men.
I think that’s it! I kept trying to recall the title but the closest I got was The Company of Wolves, which is…slightly different.
I can think of plenty. Ripley springs to mind, as does Lisbeth Salander (even though I’m not half as badass as either). The little girl in True Grit (the recent remake), Wendy from Wendy and Lucy, Turanga Leela, Red Fraggle, Big Bird (I don’t know if Big Bird has an official gender, but as a child I thought BB was a “she”). I could go on all day.
I don’t think a female character has to act particularly masculine to have men identify with her. Take Juno. A teenage girl who gets pregnant and has a baby. It doesn’t get much more female than that, but I had no trouble relating to her. Of course I never have and never will accidentally get pregnant, but I have had scares where I thought my girlfriend might be pregnant, and the broader challenges she goes through; being “different,” facing social stigmatization, having to make big, important decisions before you think you’re ready (or want to), etc. are familiar to everyone who remembers what it was like to be a teenager.
I think what Inner Stickler was trying to say–correct me if I’m wrong–is that there are certain characters, particularly in video games, that are not characters at all but simply blank slates. Characters like Samus or Chell or Link don’t have any sort of personality at all, at least in their first few incarnations. They don’t do anything except for what the player does, so to call one of them “female” just because the last shot of the game is a still picture of a woman seems silly.
I haven’t played all the way through Portal, but Chell is portrayed as female. Yeah, she could have been male just as easily, but she’s a female. And I think that she was deliberately portrayed as female, because otherwise, most people (including women) would assume that the active character is male or at best neuter. Think about it, if you never saw Chell, would you assume that an athletic gun toting character was male or female?
Link, on the other hand…he’s Going To Rescue A Princess, at least in Zelda, Zelda II, and A Link to the Past (I didn’t buy the newer Nintendo consoles). Would male gamers accept having a female avatar who is going to rescue a prince? I don’t think so.
Hell, my husband was interested in playing Parasite Eve, until he found out that the player could not choose a male avatar instead of Aya. I don’t know how many games I’ve played that don’t offer a female avatar. Very few offer only female avatars without any male options.
The Smurfette Principle addresses this, though it takes over 10 minutes to do so.
For me, it would depend on how much emphasis there is on it being a prince (I’ve never played a Zelda game unless you count Super Smash Bros. so I don’t know how it’s treated there). I’ve got no problem with playing a heroine on a quest to rescue some VIP but it would probably irk me if the plot decide that OMG, they’re totally in love!
That’s funny; I prefer playing female avatars over male ones.
So does my husband, although he claims that’s solely because if he’s going to be watching someone’s ass bouncing around on his screen while playing, it may as well be a girl one. I think he’s only partly joking.
:smack:
Well, that’s certainly a point. However, I’ve other reasons too. For one, I tend to go for the avatars different from myself; if there’s a white guy, then he’ll be my last pick, not the first. I’ll go for the women, the nonhumans and the robots first. Also female avatars are generally smaller and slimmer, and in some games that matters as far as visibility goes.
Ok, but to say that they are not “female” unless proved otherwise because “male” is the default is sexist. Half the world is made up of women.
I haven’t played Portal, but I did a little googling about Chell:
Honestly, she sound like exactly the sort of female character that that it would be nice to see more of in action games - a person in challenging circumstances who just happens to be a woman. In what way would her gender need to be made “relevant” before she is recognized as a woman and not a man in drag? I was (sort of) joking about baking cakes and crying, but honestly, what does she need to do? I assume that if she were sexualized, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, and no one would say she doesn’t count as a female protagonist.
I’ve been trying to think of a charitable way to read a man deciding which woman characters are “female” enough for him to allow them to be admitted as women and not men with vaginas, and which are not. I just can’t.
I can’t say I agree with Inner Stickler’s argument either. The problem with video game protagonists, though, as a class, is that they are in this weird sort of ghostly half-state: on the one hand, the game wants to flesh them out so that they’ll be part of a good story; on the other hand, it wants the protagonist to be as blank as possible so the player will always identify with it. It’s not near so clear-cut as with other media, where a character is a character, and you the viewer don’t have anything to do with what they do.
Sure, I get that. In a lot of ways they are stand-in characters with no real persona. If presented with a completely neutral human figure, most of us will assume it is a man because that’s the way our brains have been taught to work. That’s sort of a problem, but not the one I am taking issue with here.
What I have a problem with is when a character has been designed as and stated to be a woman, and some (dude) comes along and says, “…naw. She’s not a real woman, she doesn’t do anything womanly”. No one would make the same argument for male characters no matter how one-dimensionally they were depicted.
I was going to mention Amelie in Amelie as a female character I identified with.
Chell in Portal is an odd case, as she has very little personality even for a video game protagonist; most games these days will have cut scenes in which the characters will talk to each other & set up the plot for the next bit of shooting, but Portal doesn’t even have that. And you only really see your character incidentally. I don’t think it’s quite possible to play through the first game without seeing your character at all, but I could easily imagine someone not noticing that she was female.
(In the second game, the evil AI taunts you/Chell with gendered insults concerning your/her weight and appearance; I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse).